King's College Wimbledon Prepares Its First Vietnam Campus for 2027

King's College School Wimbledon, founded by Royal Charter in 1829 and consistently ranked among the world's top five independent schools, is preparing to open its first Vietnam campus at The Global City township in Ho Chi Minh City, with its founding cohort expected to begin in August 2027. The school is partnering with Millennia Education on the project, according to Vietcetera, which described the campus as an attempt to bring an "authentic King's education" to Vietnamese families rather than a diluted franchise version.

The campus will offer a complete British education pathway for students aged 2 to 18, from early years through IGCSE to A Levels. All teaching staff will be recruited and trained to the same standards applied at the Wimbledon school, where roughly 98 percent of pupils achieve grades 9 to 7 at GCSE and a quarter of leavers take up places at Oxbridge or Ivy League universities each year. School leaders have been explicit that maintaining those benchmarks in Ho Chi Minh City, rather than simply trading on the brand name, is the central test of the partnership.

The Vietnam rationale

King's already operates a campus in Bangkok, which opened in 2020. The Ho Chi Minh City project extends that Asia footprint into a market that has drawn sustained interest from UK operators over the past three years. Rugby School, Uppingham and Wellington College have all announced or opened Vietnamese campuses in the 2025 to 2027 cycle. Demand has been driven primarily by affluent local families rather than expatriates, a structural shift that makes Ho Chi Minh City's dense and fast-growing upper-middle-income population an unusually attractive target for a school at King's fee tier.

To build early awareness, King's ran a series of preview sessions in Ho Chi Minh City this past July, called King's Spotlight, in which teachers from the Wimbledon school delivered sample lessons in mathematics and language to Vietnamese children aged 6 to 12. School leaders described the sessions as a way to give families a concrete feel for the King's classroom before committing to places. The sessions took place at a gallery space on Vo Nguyen Giap, and VnExpress reported that interest from local families outpaced initial expectations.

The Global City bet

The campus will sit within The Global City, a large-scale mixed-use township in Ho Chi Minh City's Thu Duc district that has positioned itself as a destination for premium residential and lifestyle brands. For King's, locating there places the school within a development designed around precisely the families it is targeting: Vietnamese households investing heavily in international credentials for their children and willing to pay fees in the range the Wimbledon school commands at home.

Admissions are open now for the August 2027 intake, with the school offering early applicants priority access to founding family benefits. King's HCMC will not be Vietnam's first British school, but it will be among the most recognised UK names to enter the market, and operators watching the space will be studying its enrolment numbers closely when they are eventually disclosed.